


One Small Thing I'll Never Know, or, the Case of the Cursed Basement

by wyvernwood



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Case Fic, Cunnilingus, Detective Noir, F/F, Maybe Dubcon, POV First Person, Paranormal Romance, Period-Typical Racism, SmutSwap treat, sex to escape captivity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2019-12-26 18:12:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18287585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wyvernwood/pseuds/wyvernwood
Summary: If God was sending me a gift vampire, she was more like what I'd have asked for. From the sleek bob of her jet black hair to the stylish charcoal gray suit cut for a dame, she was pressing every button I had. They all lit up danger red.Werewolf PI Rebekah Harjo has money trouble and vampire trouble (and is her elderly white human client just racist or is his Chinese landlord really up to something sinister?) in an early-20th-century urban fantasy noir erotic thriller short.





	One Small Thing I'll Never Know, or, the Case of the Cursed Basement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prinzenhasserin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prinzenhasserin/gifts).



> Many thanks to GlassesOfJustice for beta reading and helpful suggestions.

He walked into my office like he thought he was God's gift to women. If he was, I hoped he came with a return receipt, because no way did I want any of that. The guy was absolutely sure I did, though, at least he was selling it like he was. "Look," I said, "What's a vampire like you doing looking to hire a werewolf detective?"

The double take he did was worth it. I saw it cross his mind as he attempted to figure out how I'd known. No heartbeat. He couldn't hide that from my hearing, though if I'd been human I wouldn't have known. He was skilled at pretending to the parts of life he could control: his breathing was as lifelike as I'd ever seen a vampire to manage. 

The last time I'd worked for a vampire, I'd promised myself it was the last time I would work for a vampire. I didn't intend to break that promise. 

"It's my daughter. I want you to find her for me."

If he was talking about a missing child, I thought, any child was probably better off wherever she'd run away to than with a vampire daddy. If this daughter was an adult, she could fend for herself. "Sorry, mister. I don't work for vampires."

He leaned over my desk, and I got a whiff of his breath. Nasty -- reminded me of a slaughterhouse. "I can pay double your usual fee." Too bad he didn't stop all the inhaling and exhaling once he knew I knew what he was. Force of habit, that must be. He spotted the stack of my business cards, and took more than one. 

" _I'm_ not greedy," I remarked. "No, thank you."

He went for me. Vampires are fast, but I'm faster. By the time he had his fist in my shirt collar, I had the gun with silver bullets out of the desk drawer and aimed at his throat. They'll take out vampires, werewolves, or humans -- although only the humans will be permanently dead. He let me go with a look of disgust. "You'll regret saying no to me," he said, a parting shot. 

I regretted him showing up at all. Vampires are trouble, and Nasty-breath was pushier than most. My packmates, those I'd call my brothers and sisters in much the same way the vampire probably was calling someone his daughter, had warned me when I started working for a vampire named Lester. They knew I probably wouldn't listen. Werewolves aren't known for changing their mind just because someone gave them a warning. We're more likely to ignore the wisest and best intentioned advice.

It was from Lester that I learned, up close and personal, why vampires are bad news. We'd worked well together, but I didn't need the kind of trouble vampires were. He owed me big for all I'd done for him, and one of the things I wanted from him was for him to stay away. 

I put the vampire's visit out of my mind and got on with my night. 

The next evening, she showed up. If God was sending me a gift vampire, she was more like what I'd have asked for. From the sleek bob of her jet black hair to the stylish charcoal gray suit cut for a dame, she was pressing every button I had. They all lit up danger red. 

Then I nearly jumped out of my skin, because I heard what absolutely sounded like a heartbeat. If she was a vampire and not just a vamp, she wouldn't have one of those. But there weren't enough of them for her to be human, either. 

"Ms. Harjo, it's good to meet you." Her voice was posh, but with an edge. I could tell she'd taken some pains to sound like that, and it wasn't how she'd grown up talking. With a vampire, though -- if she was one, and not something else with a slow heart beat. Though I didn't know what that could be, I wasn't the type who thought she knew everything. 

"What can I do for you, ma'am?"

"I'm not sure yet." She surveyed my office like she was thinking of taking over the lease. Or robbing the place, maybe. "I like it," she said, coming to a conclusion I wasn't sure was positive, despite the words she used. She sat herself down in my most comfortable chair, crossing her legs so one knee rested atop the other. Her shoes looked custom, some kind of cross between a brogue and a lady's pump that I'd never seen the like of before. "This is the safest place for me in the city right now. You refused to work for Paul, pulled a gun on him? So that makes you the last person he'd expect to find me with." 

"Paul's the vampire who tried to hire me and threatened me when I said no, last night? He said he was looking for his daughter."

"We aren't actually related." She looked pointedly to the side, and I could see the double puncture wound on her neck. 

"Why does he want to find you?" I didn't think it was worth asking why she didn't want to be found. She'd tell me, or not, whether I asked or I didn't. There were plenty of reasons not to want a vampire to know where you were.

"I'm Anise," she said, ignoring my question. She held her hand out, as though she wanted to shake, but she was still sitting down. 

I ignored the hand and nodded at her from where I was sitting. "Rebekah," I said. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Anise."

"Feel free to continue whatever you were doing," Anise said. "I don't want to interrupt your work."

Vampires were the oddest people. She couldn't possibly have really expected me to ignore her presence, or for customers to ignore her either, should one actually show up. I decided to play along for the moment, and went back to the accounting I'd been doing. 

I hate paperwork. Owning a business is an endless chore of writing up paperwork and receipts and filing them and making copies to deliver to bureaucrats to file away, so that if I was sued or owed taxes, they'd be sure to know everything I'd done to use against me in a court of law. I realized I needed some information that was in my files from last year, so I went into the back room to get it. 

It wasn't in the file drawer it was supposed to be in. I thought back. When I was doing taxes last year, I was bribing myself with good Scotch. Maybe I'd accidentally filed some of the papers in … I looked in the other files I thought I remembered looking at or using that night, and after wasting twenty minutes or so, I found the thing I needed. 

Clutching it in triumph, I stepped back into my office to see Anise the probably-a-vampire with my telephone receiver in her hand. "Ms. Harjo is busy, but I'd be happy to take a message," she chirped, sounding like the secretary in a radio play who's having an affair with her boss. "Yes, she'll be in," she said. "Thank you so much! Bye now." She hung the phone up, then looked at me with a bright, fake smile. "You have an appointment in ninety minutes with a Mr. Hargreaves." 

"Why don't you spend a few of those minutes telling me why you're here," I said.

"Oh, I'll find a way to make myself useful." Anise looked around. "Maybe I should dust." 

"That dust hasn't been disturbed in weeks. No point stirring up trouble now." 

She ran a finger along the top of the wainscotting and looked at the gray blob she'd collected on her fingertip. "Leave it too much longer and it might spawn dustbunnies," she said, sounding way too pleased at the prospect. 

"Do you seriously --" 

She interrupted me. "A lot of people think vampires are a myth," she pointed out. "Where's your feather duster?"

I raised my eyebrows. 

"No duster? Do you have rags?"

"In the closet." I pointed at a narrow door in the corner of the office. There was a bucket in there, a mop, rags -- I couldn't remember everything because I never opened it.

She didn't answer any of my questions, but the office looked a shade lighter by the time Hargreaves showed his face.

He was a wrinkled, stooped man who'd lost his teeth before the Kaiser lost his head. I had to wonder what brought him to my office. "Mr. Hargreaves," I said, "please, have a seat." 

He slowly settled into the chair nearest my desk. It's not the most comfortable choice, but a man in his shape would find it easier to get up again from. "It's my landlord," he said, wheezing and mumbling so I had to listen close to catch his meaning. My inner wolf wanted to perk its ears. "He's doing something in the basement. I tried to tell the police. They sent me home. I've lived there fifty-three years, but I'm afraid to stay with what he's doing down there."

The old man didn't know what his landlord was doing in the basement, but he knew it was bad. I got a description of the no-good rent collector - in his forties, Chinese, lived in a ground floor apartment in his building, kept the place in good repair, no problems until this situation had come up. I wondered if it might be a cultural issue. Or maybe organized crime was leaning on the landlord. I told the old man what I charge, he agreed to pay for two days, we shook hands and he left.

"Let's go check out what Mr. Zheng is doing," Anise said enthusiastically a few minutes after I'd put Hargreaves's check into the deposit bag for my next trip to the bank. 

"Let's do this. I'll go check it out, and you go home." 

"Can't. Paul might be looking for me there." Anise shook her head. "I have to come with you."

I considered the relatively little I knew about vampires and their activities. "Won't you need to be… somewhere safe, by morning?" 

"Eh, I'll be fine." She didn't seem concerned. 

Either she really wasn't a vampire, or whatever made her heart beat sometimes also made her problems different ones. Not like I cared. If she burnt herself to a crisp, it wasn't my problem.

We cased old Hargreaves's building, watching who went in, who came out. Anise suggested she could go try to talk to the landlord, maybe pretend she wanted to rent an apartment. It seemed harmless, so I let her go ahead and do it.

I watched from the car as she went inside. Twenty minutes or so later, she came out with a man who matched the description of the shady landlord, talking animatedly to him as he showed her around the outside of the building. They shook hands, he went back inside, and she walked away.

A few minutes later she had circled around and was getting back in my car. "Well?" 

"Zheng says there's no basement," Anise said doubtfully.

I looked at the building. There weren't any basement style windows, no little rectangles of glass set into the foundation at ground level. There was no way from the outside to tell. "Did he seem off? Suspicious? Up to something?"

"Definitely," she said. "But I'm not sure if it had to do with the basement, if it exists, or if it was something unconnected, a rent scam, numbers running -- opium?"

"Did you smell any?"

"I'm not sure I'd know it if I did," she said doubtfully.

I would. And if there was an opium den in that building, a werewolf could smell it even out here - and I didn't. "I don't think it's opium."

She shrugged. I didn't mean to let her figure catch my eye so acutely when she moved that way, but accidents happen. This was one hell of a great accident. Too bad she wasn't interested in me in the personal sort of way that'd let me get a better look on purpose. I knew she wasn't -- I would've been able to smell that, too.

It was getting late, and by that I mean early. "I should drop you off wherever you are going and turn in. I don't know if you need to sleep, but I do."

"Nowhere is safe," she said softly. "Could I stay at your office for a while? Please, Rebekah."

"If you're going to move in, call me Bek." Maybe it was to spite that vampire bastard Paul that I said yes. Or maybe it was her personal qualities. Could be both, I'm multifaceted in my bad judgment. I let her into the office. She could stay here overnight, but that meant I had to stay here, too. On no account was I leaving a strange maybe-vampire in my office on her own for that length of time. I slept on the bedroll I keep there on the floor. She was still walking around looking at things when I fell asleep. Maybe whatever-she-was was something that didn't sleep at all, but I was too tired to stay up and make sure.

At some point in the night, she'd gone into the closet and shut herself in there. For privacy? Because I was snoring? One small thing I'll never know. When I woke up, I knew she was in there, but I wasn't sure how I knew. My senses were acute even in sleep, and probably I'd heard the door open and then close and maybe smelled her less acutely. I could make up stories like that all day, for anything, and even I didn't know if they were true. 

I had to justify taking the old man's money by doing something stupid. My plan was simple, if terrible: break into the apartment building and see for myself if it did or didn't have a basement, and if it did, what was going on in there so illicit that the landlord lied and said the basement didn't exist.

Of course Anise had to come along. I still wasn't going to leave her in my office by herself. Even though I was too much of a soft touch, I wasn't completely soft in the head. She swore up and down it was fine for her to go out in the daytime, and I was hungry enough to eat the bedroll, so we went to the diner. 

She didn't catch fire when the sunlight hit her skin. I suppose I had half-expected her to, even though she didn't look afraid of it at all. Not a vampire after all? Her heart was still beating less than once a minute. Less than anyone's who I'd ever met whose heart beat at all. The mystery of what Anise was would have to wait until I had a full stomach and an empty calendar, so I drove it out of my head by reading the menu. 

Cheap, tough steak and overcooked carrots, a really good pile of fried potatoes, and an even better piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie later, I felt more myself. Anise had eaten a skimpy cheese and lettuce sandwich and a watery mound of coleslaw. Vampires didn't eat regular food, not that I'd ever seen, and rightly ought to drink red wine or blood and that was all. 

The things I didn't know about her were still a longer list than the ones I knew, but knowledge was catching up. Maybe I'd know enough by the end of the day to leave her alone in the office, so I could get a real night's sleep in my own bed. Probably not, but I could dream.

Breaking into the apartment building was a matter of making it look like we belonged there. I'd watched people go in and out of the building long enough to get the general idea of who lived there. I put my hair in a scarf, bought a bag of sundries and looked like maybe I was the daughter of one of the residents, coming to visit with gifts or necessities. I told Anise she could wait in the car this time. 

It was too easy to get in, and I was too thick to realize it was a trap. The lock was nothing, I picked it without having to look like I was doing anything but messing with a stuck door, and I was in the hallway. I tapped lightly on each door that wasn't obviously to an actual apartment, too softly to sound like someone knocking, but enough to hear the echoes of a stairwell if there was one beyond. The first three were closets. The fourth was a stairway, and locked. Easily picked again. 

I felt a static shock when I opened it, and I paid no attention. It looked like the basement was not a lie. Stairs led down into darkness. I didn't need a light, but it was dim even to my eyes as I walked down three half-flights, one more than I'd expected, before I reached the bottom.

Not completely thick, I saw the tripwire. I carefully stepped over it, and then everything went dark.

When I woke, it was at least four hours later. My arms and legs hurt, partly from sleeping on them wrong, mostly from the ropes that I was tied up with. I didn't know if it was dark out. There were no windows. I was sure I was still in the basement of Hargreaves's apartment building.

"You're awake." It was a whisper, and a weak one. Anise didn't sound well. What was she doing here? 

I'd apparently been so deeply unconscious I hadn't known she came looking for me, and found me. I didn't feel too bad, but I couldn't move very much. Some struggling made it clear I was tied up too tight to get myself loose by sheer muscle. 

There was another way, but I didn't want to do it. Anise probably knew I was a werewolf, but knowing it theoretically and seeing it happen were entirely different. "You tied up too?" I said, assuming it, though I couldn't see her. That was strange. It was not quite so dark in here that I couldn't see, but I couldn't see _her._ Where was she?

"No," her weak, whispery voice said, "but I can't untie you. I tried. Too weak. The ropes are on you tight."

I was about to mention the knife in my pocket, but I realized it wasn't there anymore. I would've been able to feel it. "Guess there's no other way then. Here goes." I began shifting.

Since I didn't know what Anise was, I had no idea if she could see it happening or not. Maybe she was as blind in this dark as an average human. Maybe she could see better than I could. Maybe she'd gone invisible. By the time I was a wolf, I didn't care about things like that. But I was out of the ropes.

In wolf form, I didn't think like I do when I'm in human form. I knew where she was, though. She'd moved, and one of the blobby shapes I could see moved, and it was her. There was a tarp over her. I caught it in my teeth and dragged it off her. I smelled blood, her blood, and she was naked. Wolf me licked her face. 

Anise made a ragged gasp and tried to pull away, but she was sick, or wounded, wolf me sensed both. She couldn't get away from my licking. I was trying to help, in my mindless wolf way, and sensed her fear, though I couldn't smell it, and wasn't sure it was real. But seeing fear and not smelling it disturbed wolf me, so I changed back to my human form to try to understand. 

Which I did, immediately. "Sorry to scare you like that, but I had to get out of those ropes," I said. We were both naked now.

"You're a werewolf." Her whisper was able to convey her surprise, though it lost a bit from the shriek or shout I would've expected if she was in better shape. 

"I assumed you knew." I shrugged. "You're the oddest vampire I ever met, if you even are one. Are you hurt? I see blood, but it doesn't look like you're bleeding."

"They drained me." 

"Who?" 

"There were three of them. You were already here, tied up and unconscious. They caught me coming in looking for you and… somehow immobilized me. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, for several minutes, and they used those minutes to drain my blood and my strength." She shivered. "I think they left me with you thinking I'd feed from you to regain it."

I thought about this. Reasonable deduction, especially if she was a vampire. The guys who had captured us were intelligent. Bad luck for us. "Why didn't you?"

She didn't answer.

"Are you actually enough of a vampire that it'd help? Because, go ahead, I can spare you some, and then we'll get out of here." Obvious answer was that she wasn't a vampire and that was why she hadn't drunk my blood, got stronger, untied me and got us out. I suspected the obvious answer was wrong, and I didn't know why, but I listened to that kind of gut intuition. It'd got me out of worse predicaments than this one. At least, worse than I thought this one was. I wasn't completely sure.

"It would help, but, I can't." Anise was sounding ever weaker. I really did not mind giving her some blood. "I'd need my fangs out for it to help, and that's…"

"Something wrong with your fangs?"

"Some vampires' fangs come out if they are hungry or weak enough, some if they're -- aroused -- but mine, it's not that easy." She was having trouble getting the words out. She sounded, under the weak strain of her whispers, like she was embarrassed. Was a vampire's ability to get their fangs out that much of a point of pride? "I need to be -- very aroused, and I can't."

"I know I'm not your type, but --"

"It isn't that," she interrupted. "My fangs don't come out until I'm on the verge of orgasm, and I couldn't -- while you were asleep, I tried -- touched myself, but, nothing." She tried to look in my direction, but couldn't meet my eyes. That told me she could see me. It was something, at least. Another item to add to the list of things I knew about Anise, she could see in the dark. "I'm sorry," she added.

Okay. That sounded like she'd been masturbating next to me while I was out cold. "I'm sorry too. Sorry I missed it." I couldn't help smiling. "Listen," I said. "If you're willing, I can give it a try. I don't think we're getting out of here otherwise." If I had to carry her, and the bad guys found us, we'd be dead meat. If she was back on her feet, together we might have a chance against them. Plus ulterior motives, of course. I was both practical and predatory. Decency as most humans see it is nothing much compared to survival and mating instincts, as drives go, and it had no chance against both allied.

Probably, given how I was taking advantage, there'd be no chance of anything more in that regard, but I didn't think there had been much chance of anything more before. At least this way if it went the way I hoped, she'd know my skills were worth something when it came to pleasure. And if it didn't go the way I hoped, there'd probably be no future for either of us to care if anything more happened, and at least my last memory would be a really good one.

Human brains are so good at rationalizing. "Give what a try?" Anise asked. 

"Let me try to make your fangs come out," I said. I demonstrated what I meant by cupping her breasts in my hands, running my thumbs over her nipples. "I can make you come hard enough to get them, no matter how stubborn they are," I promised. 

She gasped, then managed to say, "all right," and I went ahead with plan O.

Her body reacted to my touch just like a human woman's, and not at all like a vampire's. I've been with both, and I know which is which. I gave up trying to figure that puzzle out and relaxed into the animal side of the human form, which was even more of a relief than it usually is, what with the myriad of possible futures where our captors came back before we finished and knocked us unconscious again or worse. I stopped thinking of everything that could go wrong and focused on making Anise's body go right. 

I could still smell that she didn't want me, though. It took the edge off my enjoyment, but she'd agreed, and she needed this to survive, so she wouldn't be too angry afterward. She didn't have anywhere else to go, anyway. I had to stop thinking again, because that thought felt much worse than I'd expected it to. Maybe if I did this well enough, she'd want me another time. Shut up, human-form thoughts, shut all the way up.

My tongue trailed down Anise's body from between her breasts to her navel. I slowly slid my fingers between her thighs as I kissed her there, the lightest of touches, just to see whether she was swelling yet, and where, and encourage the process along. There was a faint strawberry smell on her skin that reminded me of the pie I'd had for dessert, along with the usual taste of sweat and her skin's natural biome. It's rich, that taste. It would be richer, lower down. 

I kissed her mound as I slipped my fingertips, still with light touches, into the folds to find her clit. It was a tiny thing, barely there, but swelling a little under my touches. I licked my way to the triangle at the front where the lips all meet; it's a sensitive spot, and she gasped again, moved her hips, and my fingers felt more swelling. I got my tongue onto her clit and dabbed gently at it, giving it attention, then back to that first sensitive spot and more delicate strokes. 

Not too fast, but not too slow, I coaxed her clit out from its hood, and her taste grew richer with her growing arousal. I still couldn't smell anything that I thought meant she was into me, or even into what I was doing, but it definitely felt good to her body, and if there was any hope at all of that making her fangs release, that was reason enough to keep going, even if I hadn't been working myself up into a panting heat of my own. I focused as best I could on Anise, which only made me more aroused, and so it always has gone for me. 

At a certain point, when my face buried in her cush was making me so excited I lost control of my mind entirely, I started anticipating how it would feel when her fangs did come out, and she sunk them into me. 

It wouldn't be the first time a vampire drank my blood. The reason I'd sworn off working for them was that I wasn't sure I could give that up, and I refused to be an addict. The pleasure of the vampire bite was the ~~worst~~ best there was. It was the feeling of sneaking off to smoke opium when your packmates were going into battle, the feeling of fucking your little sister's lover. It was bliss and shame and the horror of one enhancing the intensity of the other. 

I couldn't wait.

She was really weak, but all the strength she had left was going into bucking under me, and I was keeping up only because I was a werewolf and we're physically superior and also because I had got the hang of her rhythm, and maybe a little bit because she was not trying to push me off. She wanted my mouth as much as my mouth wanted her clit. I was sucking on it now, rubbing and pressing against the other swollen parts of her cush apace and she was very close to a climax, I knew it, I knew it -- I kept my fingers moving against her so wet she probably couldn't tell they weren't my tongue anymore, and moved my body up hers until I could press her mouth against the side of my neck. 

I felt the fangs. We'd done it. And they sunk into my flesh, oh, the _release_ \--

Red washed over my vision replacing the dark gray of the low light. Red with gold flashes and the taste of chocolate and overripe blueberries and honey, coffee with sweet vanilla cream, fresh rabbit flesh after a chase and a fast kill, the buzzing of a million bees, and the pleasure, unalloyed with shame, blissful and clean and overwhelming beyond anything I'd ever felt --

It ebbed away after a short eternity and I felt her tongue licking something warm and wet off my neck. "Bek," Anise's voice said, low but strong again, so strong, "you did it. Are you all right?"

"Fuck yes," I said without thinking. I probably should have been more ladylike, but it was too late to care about that. "Let's get out of here."

Maybe they'd expected her to drain me and kill me. It was the only reason I could think of that they were so unprepared when we came out of that room naked and into the room where they were. Three men in black robes with glowing green runes on them were holding hands in a circle and chanting. There was a strange mist in the center of the circle. They didn't let go right away when they saw us. There were a couple of spare black robes, sans glowing runes, hanging by the door we'd come in. I grabbed one and pulled it on. Anise did likewise.

One of them said something I couldn't make out, possibly in Chinese. Anise froze for a moment, but I pulled her along and she snapped out of it fast. It could be that she had a resistance to the spell after having had it put on her once before, but I think it was my blood in her. Werewolf blood is strong even when it's not in the werewolf anymore. Either way, we raced for the other door. The men broke their circle to try to stop us. 

The weird white mist went for one of them. The other two headed toward Anise and me. But we were a match for them one on one, overpowered them and made it out. The white mist was reaching for the two as we slammed the door behind us.

"I don't know what that was, but I'm not going back down there," I told Anise.

"They summoned something," she said. "Someone has to send it back."

"Let's hope they can manage, because I don't have a clue how to do that." I shrugged. "At least we solved the case. The landlord is up to something in the basement."

"None of those guys was the landlord," she said. "Only one of them was even Chinese."

I hadn't seen their faces well, what with the black hooded robes they had been wearing. "One of them was Chinese," I said. "And the old man maybe got confused. I wonder if they put a spell on the landlord so he forgot he even had a basement." 

She laughed. It wasn't much of one, but I was surprised she could laugh at all so soon. We made it to the car and I drove us back to my office.

I was more tired than I'd realized. I curled onto the bedroll almost immediately and fell asleep. When I woke up, Anise was snuggled up to me, still asleep. She still didn't smell attracted to me, and I felt a keen disappointment, but the comfort of her being there made up for it a little. Wolves sleep in piles, in packs. I missed that. It was nice to have it again, even with a sort of vampire. I'd have to look into what she was. Later. I drifted back to sleep, chasing sheep in my dreams.

The next day I called in an anonymous tip about the guys in the basement and the thing they'd summoned. Someone would get sent in there to exterminate it. I was just glad it wasn't me. 

There was a bit about it in the police blotter column in the newspaper, a couple of days later. That was that taken care of. I felt better about keeping old Mr. Hargreaves's money after I read that.

A couple more weeks and I'd figured out Anise didn't have a lot of the emotion smells most of us had. She didn't smell scared, she didn't smell attracted -- it was all of a thing. So I might never know if she was, but lousy as that felt, there was a drop of hope in it.

I dropped by at the home of the vampire I'd worked for most recently and buttonholed him as he left for his evening's work.

"I need to talk to you, Lester."

"Thought you said you were through with me for good, Harjo."

"Thought I was." I frowned at him. "I need a favor. You owe me for the Beacon job."

"I paid you a lot for the Beacon job, Harjo."

"Yeah, you did. But you know damn well if you'd been straight with me about what I'd have to do, I wouldn't have taken it for any money. So you owe me."

He saw the truth in that. I was lucky he was one of the few vampires who'd let that make him feel obligated. "What then?"

"Some asshole vampire named Paul tried to hire me, and when I said no, he tried to kill me. Then some girl he was after came around. I like her, and I want him either gone or never bothering her or me again."

"Some girl?"

"Name of Anise." I was trusting him with this. I knew him well enough to know I could. I wished, in a way that I didn't, but the good side of that was, if I hadn't, this problem would've been much harder to fix.

"If I do this, I don't owe you anymore. And you owe me."

"No, but we're square."

"You owe me or you return the money I paid you. This favor's worth everything you did. It won't be easy."

"But you can do it?" I asked. He nodded. I nodded back. "All right then. I owe you."

Lester took care of Paul. And I hope, really I do, that the day never comes that he calls in that marker. I thought about telling Anise that she didn't have to worry about Paul anymore. But if I did that, she wouldn't have a reason to keep living in my office. I've got used to having her around.


End file.
